Multihued Multitudes of Mumbaikars

My experience thus far in Mumbai has encouraged me to ponder and act in ways that I have not previously been compelled to comport myself. The brazen attitude that one must adopt in order to board a second-class coach during rush hour is something that you cannot develop prior to actually being here. The adjustment to sheer volume of human beings takes some time. In fact, perhaps living in such a congested, clogged, and crowded metropolis might not be at all desirable in the long term. However, the human truths that can be accumulated by living the metropolitan grind are so far worth the struggle.

Density...is the first reality with which one must become accustomed in this town. With a metro population of around 18 million bodies, that's something like 36 million each of ears, eyes, and kidneys. 180 million toes and fingers. 18 million souls. The average density in Greater Mumbai, which is the name given to the city itself and which does not include the population of the whole urban agglomeration, is something like 40,000 inhabitants per square kilometer. This absolutely staggering density of human habitation, while not close to the 170,000 inhabitants per square kilometer in the Lower East Side of NY in 1905, is considerably higher than 50,000 people per sqkm in many parts of the city. While sheer volume of people is no way to judge quality of life or ease of transport throughout a city, the congestion that plagues Mumbai is a function of a vast inability to cope with staggering population growth.

Map of Population Density by Country
Selected Urban Population Densities

Of three other world cities whose population densities in certain incredibly packed areas rival Mumbai's (Hong Kong, Cairo, and Shanghai), perhaps only Cairo would strike the average visitor as more overwhelming, due to a number of factors, including poverty stats, crime, and general overcrowding. Yet, Mumbai does not have a crime problem. Crime is a subject that will be dealt with in later entries, but for all intents and purposes, crime is not on the short list of perennial urban difficulties in India. Poverty and general overcrowding top the list of most daunting urban challenges in this Island City. Mumbai is strikingly civil, despite its chaotic traffic interchanges, overflowing trains, and reckless rickshaws. The humans who inhabit this dazzling metropolis do not carry on with the sort of anger and embitterment that would characterize a city inhabited by New Yorker-Americans in a town almost 1/4 the size of New York, at the gateway to a country with well over 3X the population of the United States, with an area less than 1/3 the size of the continental US. Americans would kill each other if they were confined to conditions that Indians tolerate. Period. A tiny fraction of the space. A tiny fraction of the wealth. Yet, Indians get by, eking out lives with their big hearts and impossibly charming demeanors.

Divisions...by caste and religion, age and gender, language and education are astounding. Indians, contrary to what foreigners usually expect when coming to India, are of a range of divergent types. The demographic divisions that separate Indians from each other are on a level that Westerners often cannot appreciate. The endless list of tribes (7% of the overall population), formerly untouchable "Dalit" castes (16%) are positively endless. The manner with which a woman folds her saree and how a man conducts his head wiggle and where one goes to acknowledge humility before a higher power are things that vary with inconceivable range.

Diversity...is a gift and a curse. While Indians have experienced a horrific calamity several times - first and most notably during the Partition with Pakistan in 1947, the dream of a unified cultural whole lives on. Whether unified behind the notion of Hindutva or behind the national cricketeer squad, somehow the nation clunks along as a mostly coherent amalgamation of socio-linguistic communities. The several thousands of caste groups (jatis) retain the sense of tribal distinctiveness that was more or less always a part of life on the subcontinent, yet this ancestral heritage is in certain key ways losing its grip on the modernizing, globalizing, and Indianizing system. India works. India works hard. She works hard to make progress as a cohesive expression of national will. I have no concept of how this is possible. What sort of cultural constitution makes this possible at such a grand scale? Although China has several hundred million more people, I dare say India's task of keeping its far more variegated communities unified is a far more improbable task.


Disparity...is a concept that Thomas Friedman recently attempted to address in a recent column on the release of a cheap new Tata motor vehicle that will aim to inundate first-time car purchasers with an unbeatable bargain. At a mere 1 lakh (100,000 Rupees = $2,500), this vehicle will permit masses of middle-class Indians to drive to work, drive to class, drive to the collective neoliberal paradise, which in other words, is a congested ecological catastrophe. While I have not always agreed with Friedman's often neocon and/or neoliberal tendencies, I found that his green streaks shone through on this piece. No, No, Tata

His fundamental point was that clean mass mobility must trump over the near-term rush to develop, market, and compete. Without more concern for the long-term consequences of increasingly clogged roadways, railways, and sidewalks, Mumbai will begin to burst. Cheaper cars will mean more demand for petroleum, more pollution, and more traffic. Although the egalitarian impulse embedded in all of us would have us believe that all Indians have the right to drive their own cars 25 miles a day wherever they please in the same careless way that Americans parade their motor vehicles around asphalt mazes. But, the plain truth is that if all Indians were granted this so-called right to own a car, India would cease to be. I agree with Friedman's assertion that Indians must somehow jump over the car step in the evolution of transport. Build more rail lines, enact legislation to decrease the number of vehicles permitted into the city, and reverse densification-redevelopment policies that threaten to destroy any remaining semblance of urban sanity.

Dolor, depravity, destruction, delapidation...find their way into Dharavi's complex existence because this heart-shaped area of the city is Asia's biggest slum, by most estimates. Slum life is a mode of survival, reproduction, and employment unto itself - entirely the topic of another entry. But, the dreadful extremes that exist in Mumbai are embodied by the continued prosperity of its notoriously gargantuan slum. After two visits to this vibrant disaster, I have simply become more confused about human suffering and about man's capacity to cope with the most disgusting and degraded circumstances. Dharavi is Mumbai at its best and its worst. Mumbai gone horribly wrong yet Mumbai that tries, triumphs, and turns over. Another day, another dollar and a dream.

Dis-abled Lives

Last night, I was awakened to the reality that lots of people in the world have physical handicaps that make it impossible to function in a so-called normal way that most of us are accustomed to. I had forgotten how fortunate I am not to have a physically disabling condition that would render my interactions with the world far more difficult.

So, last evening, I had the privilege of meeting a fellow named Victor, who enjoys the use of very few muscles due to a seriously incapacitating form of muscular distrophy. In order to get around town, he needs friends to chaperone his hooked up van with an electro lift, and in order to get upstairs to chill with us, we had to guide Victor through the building's back entrance to the elevators since his highly versatile and mobile electric wheelchair cannot scale stairs.

In addition to transportation difficulties, Victor faces enormous challenges in breathing, dressing, eating, and most every other imaginable ordinary human pursuit. This leads me to respect him ad infinitum. I cannot conceive of how serious physical handicaps allow for "normal" lives, but I suppose people generally attempt to make the best of what's on their life's plate.

Berkeley, the alternative, colorful, and iconoclastic hamlet where I reside currently, has historically been a mecca for both physically and mentally handicapped people, who have access to community services and sensitive legal structures that ease their lives. For those of us who don't have friends or family in the position of requiring such extensive social aid, I think it's rather difficult to fathom the handicapped lifestyle. At what point does one come to terms with a debilitating condition? Is it something that one gradually is uplifted by or does the passing of the years wear one down to a greater extent? Of course, there are the FDRs and Larry Flynts of the world who manage to get by in wheelchairs; there are Cambodian and Bosnian landmine victims who overcome interminal adversity to lead satisfactory lives.

Do handicapped people have recurring dreams of being "normal" again? Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump certainly never acclimated to his disabled state. Maybe the ability to be satisfied with your abilities varies according to whether you were born with the condition or experienced a life-altering catastrophic event that initiated your disability. Vision problems, nervous disorders, heart conditions, lung deficiencies, brain damage: the list is unending of how the human body can fail, leaving one vulnerable to the generosity that one's social network and society are willing to provide in order to make moment-to-moment existence more favorable.

It really is paramount to realize our good fortune and to attempt to take advantage of the finite abilities with which we are endowed. We could all be chopped down from our heights of greatness. There will never be a fully satisfactory answer to the queries posed by the Book of Job. Bad fortune strikes at will.

GOD & BIBLE

The following text is excerpted from an email written to my father upon arrival in New Orleans on October 29, 2005:

I'm not certain what to think about an enlightenment type of rationalism, which was always prevalent in american history (ie founding fathers and DEISM). I professed adherence to this sect in middle school when mr. clapp demanded to know what halloween costume i was wearing, and i replied philosopher and then proceeded to name which philosophies i followed. however, i experience a marked shift in my ideological bent after 7th grade, when i definitely grew cynical of the power of enlightenment rationalism, humanism, classicism, etc. Turning towards postmodernism, surrealism, existentialism was a response to the failure of pure rationalism in desribing the world and making sense of it.

So, i definitely have a problem with coldy scientific-rational atheism because it is rootless and ultimately unfulfilling. i'm currently reading thru this tikkun magazine to determine whether spiritual progressives are on the mark. i dont think faith is bad. i think faith is good for society, as long as its progressive, open, tolerant...i think it gets people into trouble when they push their system onto others and develop attitudes of spritual and ethical exclusivity. but in terms of the philosophy we want to push in the new BIBLE (Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth), i think we just need to go shopping to see whats out there intellectually. because utlimately we have to place our system in the spectrum somewhere. while its nice to feign neutrality, objectivity, pure rationality, atheism, etc, i think this is an ill-advised course, replete with spiritual alienation and disingenuous motives.

Human life is ulimately and profoundly self-regarding. we exist to propagate ourselves. as an extension of this, we seek to reproduce our intellectual systems by spreading our cultural moeurs and ideas. so we certainly do have a stake in it all, and theres no sense pretending we don't follow a god (god being either the guy in the sky, one's guiding principle of PI, or just the admission that we can't really figure out WHY). so while logical humanism, positivism, and all those beautiful western constructs are certainly a central part of our social and emotional universe, they're so full of incorrect assumptions about human nature, economics, world history, civilizations...regardless, GOD is just an excuse that gives people a justification for how they wish to act. in that way, i wish fundamentalists would just admit that they personally dont like black, Arab, or gay people, rather than pretending that their authority is based on some textual or holy precept that issues them the right to exert moral suasion...god just describes anyone's vision of a controlling identity/entity, the super mover and shaker, intelligent design, original energy, higher power...but in an everyday sense, it desribes SOCIETY and the SUPEREGO.

Saying that god does not want me to steal just means that my society has a law forbidding this. god arose in the human consciousness when people began to understand morality as a guiding force and the idea that maybe their past and present actions had an effect on the present and future. so essentially, i dont think you can eliminate the word GOD from the discourse. to do so would be myopic. it doesnt matter how much people talk about god if their morality and worldviews are progressive. it's just that fundamentalists have monopolized the discussion of god. its the same thing with regards to "values." in america, values connote this traditional sense of nostalgia for some mythical past in which the family, state, and society were so much better. when it comes to rational-humanist discourse, the vocabulary always comes down to the words pragmatic, practical, secular, etc...i think this hurts the discourse because leftists and progressive try so hard to be objective, practical, idealistc.

But the truth is, leftists are pushing values too, they believes in a certain code and have a specific vision for human society. this is wholly subjective and a function of cultural, psychological, and personal background. i think we have to be partisan in this discourse. and not exclusive, hardheaded, arrogant like the traditional leftist-secular-atheistic-rational discourse. the leftist-secular-atheistic-rational creed implies a GOD no less than any other creed. it's just that this GOD is certainly contained in us all, since in the lockean-jeffersonian code (derived from a blend of renaissance neoclassical philosophy and protestant theology,) we are all created equal with the same ability to reason. so in our new BIBLE, our god might instead be some type of earth-shattering and novel conception. i think its just being honest to say that one's outlook, motivation, sense of purpose, etc...is equivalent to god. god is internal, external, everywhere. dont bother excluding god. its not only a waste of effort, but its embracing a different lie. while that lie isnt as blatant as the religious-fundamentalist-originalist lie, its a lie nonetheless. atheists just have a different god. they worship (among other things) civic duty, science, western culture, neoprimitive culture, etc. god is just a way of naming what is considered most important in life. if YOU believe that a viable, progressive code of ethics, personal happiness, and future generations are the most important things to you, then this is your god...that god happens to be more individualistc, compassionate, progressive, etc than the typical western-christian god, but this is nonetheless a god.

The fact that 90% of americans believe in god just means that 90% of americans enjoy being part of the herd. its just a group mentality. despite all the dispossession, spiritual dearth, and cultural alienation of modern life, people like to feel that theyre a part of something greater than themselves...and this manifests itself in a romanticized conception of the past (family, morality, country) and this has been monopolized by the religious right. americans are so outwardly religious because they are so overworked, brainwashed, burnt out that they must desperately proclaim faith in something in order to die knowing that they lived for some greater good. i read a great article a while back saying that bush won because people are way too overworked and that people wish they had more free time...ie they dont have enough time to think thru the issues and they vote for a simpler, manichean, binary candidate who addresses their spiritual needs. thats the republican way. brainwash people so they can all be your corporate slaves then in the little free time they have, make sure they worship the god of free markets and god of white christianity a little bit more and then they can die happy.

The western corporate-governmental-bureaucratic-media-entertainement-legal-medical-scientific-intellectual power structure has gotten so much more exponentially powerful every single year for the past 100 years, especially in america, that people have no choice but to turn to the irrational, the faith-based, and the frankly stupid answer because it comforts them. and which side of this power structure are we on? do we side with the corporate-governmental-bureaucratic-media-entertainement-legal-medical-scientific-technological-intellectual elite? i think its comforting to identify with the dominant culture because it involves the path of least resistance. however, we both certainly have innate tendencies to resist this conformity. yet, insurrectionary intentions are not rewarded in our system. i tend to give credit to people who are individuals and can resist this power structure. i believe that this is what makes people unique, when their energies, creativies, imaginiations, can resist the allure of our oppressive social order. even if there cannot be a revolution at this point, there are little ways in which all of us can be progressive, compassionate, unique. i just fear that i will ultimately succumb to this power structure because it is indeed a mammoth. in my capacity as intellectual-journalist-activist-artist-social scientist-humanist-existentialist-postmodernist, the behemoth SUPEREGO is my enemy. my freudian ID does not appreciate the absolutist-totalitarian controls that the MAN imposes. but, the truth is, the only way to understand, then critique, and then vilify the SYSTEM is to get inside of it...

And the only way to get inside is to be a part of it. so my answer is to be simultaneously inside and outside. Is my perspective useful to the system in that its criticisms are constructive and can be used merely to strengthen the systemic controls over ordinary people? Or is my perspective parasitic in the sense that it attacks intellectually the source of its own material, social, and cultural heritage? perhaps this is eternally the role of the outcast-outsider-wanderer who is simultaneously so successful at beating the system, being the system, and bringing down the system.

Hood House Holdings, LLP

If y'all didn't already know, Gabe Nelson and I are highly interested in undertaking a business venture called Hood House Holdings, which would invest in a blighted block somewhere deep in the hood. Our goal is first to identify a place so immersed in blight that other real estate sharks have not beat us to the punch. It's very important to get a good value on a purchase. Thus, we would like to avoid locations where demand for hood houses is already elevated. In addition to having deep hood status, it would be optimal for the location to be near somewhat commerical amenities and also in proximity to some sort of green space.

Second, upon identifying our block of interest, the next task is project financing. We intend to keep the city abreast of our plans, but we are not certain if we could cut a deal with the city for a whole block of abandoned, city-owned property. Either way, we would be shopping around to banks for a competitive loan for our Hood House Holdings venture. It's a shame that interest rates have gone up several percentage points on commerical loans in the past two years. It's not quite as cheap these days as it was when interest rates bottomed out. Regardless, other sharks face the same market pressures, as the money supply is tightened and less projects in general seek financing.

Third, after ascertaining a solid plan for financing this venture, the perfect opportunity would arise to design a block-long hood house with amenities never before seen in an American hood. Upon assembling a team of certified Hopkins engineers, the house would get severely tricked out. I suppose the security system would first need to be tweaked, since such a feature would prevent future loss of goods from the Hood House. The exterior of the dwelling would get tagged up by our team of graf artists, and we would commission the city's gayest landscape designers to spruce up the sidewalk and generally spruce up the Hood House. Internally, we would definitely require some rather serious renovations to the existing property. Hipsterites and like-minded folk would be promised a spot in the dwelling complex if they agreed to participate in the project.

Overall, the general concepts have been described for our plan to enter into a serious process of Hood renewal. We are interested in this mission to create an oasis of different culture in the otherwise-blighted Hood. Moreover, it'll be an affordable place to live and a solid real estate investment. In our process of detournement, we seek to extend the Situationist ideal to the hood. Spontaneous injection of postmodern attitudes and contrarian sensibilities into the Hood will be a way to address the outrageous separation that characterizes our divided society. We aim to counter the trend of gentrification with our brand of residential and commerical life, which not only respects Hood hospitality but actually integrates the finest aspects of Hood life into the fabric of our venture. We extol certain aspects/virtues of hood culture and seek to live on the fringe of bourgeois society, forming a link between the outcasts of the Hood and the card-carrying bourgeoisie.

Hood House Holdings is gettin' busy. Watch out now, we're bringing the whole crew in for Situationist instigation and exaltation.